Historia Augusta is the modern title for an ancient collection of imperial biographies from Hadrian (117-138) to Carus, Carinus, and Numerian (282-285). As it stands today in the manuscripts, it consists of thirty separate biographies, attributed to six different authors, Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio and Flavius Vopiscus Syracusanus, of varying length coverage, many of them dedicated to Diocletian or Constantine. Besides covering all of the reigning emperors in this period - with the exception of the emperors from Phillip the Arab to Aemilian, that is from the period 244 to 253, whose biographies are lost in a manuscript lacuna - it also includes separate biographies of some junior emperors who never reigned, such as Aelius Caesar (Hadrian's short-lived heir apparent), co-emperors, such as Antoninus Geta (Caracalla's brother and co-Augustus, who reigned briefly with his father Severus from 209-211, before being murdered by his brother after their father's death), and usurpers such as Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus.
As our only surviving extended Latin source covering imperial history after Suetonius, and indeed our only extant narrative source for the period between where Herodian gives out (238) and the rise of the tetrarchy of Diocletian, the HA has long had an outsized importance for Roman historians. And yet it has long been subject to doubts. Often - far too often - where we can test its claims against other historical or archaeological evidence its 'facts' have proven unfounded. Its authors all seem to display an unhealthy fascination with minutia, trivia, and scandal, while often evincing scant interest in important historical events. In the late nineteenth century, a young epigrapher and prosopographer, Hermann Dessau, became particularly troubled by many of the names in the text: they were wrong, but not simply wrong, but wrong for the era in which the figures with them were supposed to be living. The names tended to be characteristic of Roman names of the later fourth and early fifth century, and yet in the text they were given to third-century figures. With this flash of insight, Dessau was able to deconstruct the whole edifice of what the text purported to be. All six of the supposed authors had the same intellectual interests, and wrote a Latin that was indistinguishable. Despite being written supposedly during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, the text drew a passage verbatim from the Historia of Sex. Aurelius Victor, which was written in 360. In brief, as he showed in his seminal article from 1889, nothing was as it seemed. The whole text was written by one author, not six, and this author was working toward the end of the fourth century, and not the beginning. Hence, fundamentally, this author was not to be trusted, and everything he wrote, where it was not specifically corroborated elsewhere, hangs under a cloud of suspicion.
There is one thing, however, about the text we do know for certain: the author of the HA drew on the work of Victor, Eutropius and Festus. Given Victor's empire-wide fame and readership, this must count as the premier anachronism in the text, and any explanation of what the author is trying to accomplish should start with this fact. The purpose of the whole fraudulent superstructure - of different authors writing at the beginning of the fourth century - may just be to conceal the author's recourse to a work written around the middle of the century, using the well-known confidence trick of literary frauds, like Dares the Phrygian or Ps-Dionysius. If this is so, the text has no secure anchor in the last decade of the fourth century, and indeed could have been written anytime between ca. 370 and the sixth century.
The principal manuscript transmitting the text is a magnificent Carolingian codex from an unknown centre dating to around 825, now Pal. lat. 899. Another roughly coeval manuscript of the text was housed at Murbach Abbey into the early modern period, but all that survives is a single folio (Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek Frag. lat. 7). From the fourteenth century, we have a new florescence of manuscript copies, with several dozen dating from ca. 1400 to 1600, many of them presenting the text in a radically different form. The editio princeps was produced at Milan in 1475 and the equally important second edition at Venice in 1489. The current standard edition is Hohl's Teubner of 1927.
The Last Historians of Rome project (September 2024-August 2029) is
funded by a Standard Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC), and is led by scholars at the Universities of Edinburgh and Nottingham.
